


Little Brown Jug

by rixie_rhee



Series: In the Mood [15]
Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, F/M, Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-15
Updated: 2017-12-15
Packaged: 2019-02-15 02:08:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13020996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rixie_rhee/pseuds/rixie_rhee
Summary: The floor was white octagons with black squares offset between them. Subway tile marched halfway up the wall and the blue paint was a cool, soothing spring blue of robin’s eggs. Nix’s vomit stained all that clean, pretty tile and Rissy wiped it up. Everything here seemed too neat, and for a minute Nix remembered soap that turned the bathwater milky and almost opaque and the chipped tub that never looked completely clean even when it was. But that was a long time ago now.“I broke our picture.” This feels like both a confession and a question.“You broke the glass, honey, you didn’t break us.” She hardly ever uses endearments with him, usually just his name. It’s in the way she says it though, how the L comes out so liquid and soft, softer than it ever does when she says any other word. “You couldn’t. Don’t you know that, Lew?”





	Little Brown Jug

It happened once, one time, and that was all.  
Rissa went out to do her shopping with Richie and Emma in tow. It was a Saturday morning. They left after breakfast, after the dishes were done and put away. Everything was cleaned up, in order. The girl comes on Friday to clean, always Mondays and Fridays, sometimes Wednesday, too. It’s something that Rissa never got used to completely. She didn’t want anyone to live with them, she wanted to have the raising of her own children. She did like the girl, though, and she would be more companionable than would be proper. They would have tea or hot chocolate--as Rissa still didn’t like coffee--together and Rissa would make Bridget promise not to tell anyone.  
But this was a Saturday around ten am. Richie and Emma were small yet, only five and two, and they kissed their daddy’s face and Rissy kissed his mouth. There was a shadow on Nix’s face that Rissy didn’t like, but he said he was fine and she didn’t press it any further. Later, she would tell herself that she should have known better, that she knows Lew better. Richie and Emma were clamoring, Scarlet was not only underfoot but undereverything as only very large dogs can be, and there was so much to be done. They left and took all the noise with them.  
New shoes for the children, a dress for Emma, undershirts for Nix. The bookstore for something for everyone. Milkshakes from the Tastee-Freeze and drinking them in the car parked under a tree, wiping up the spill before it got sticky. Food shopping. Stopping at the park while the ice cream softened and then started to melt in the trunk of Rissy’s car. It could still seem foreign sometimes that there was always enough, more than enough. When the little ones’ cheeks were stained with pink roses, she gathered them up and herded them back into the car. They fell asleep in the backseat and their little heads lolled against the seat.  
They were gone less than four hours. Nix had been drunk for at least three. It reeked of alcohol when Rissa opened the door. Emma was asleep on her hip, Richie was holding her hand and walking groggily. She should have left them in the front room but she didn’t, and they found Nix in the sitting room, in front of the fireplace. He was just standing there but his posture was all wrong and there were broken bottles at his feet. Dark stains spread outwards on the delicate rug turning the muted blues and greens and golds muddy. Richie wrinkled his nose at the smell, Nix swore and said something ugly. (It was directed at himself; he almost always directed it at himself. The sun created a kind of halo through Rissy’s hair and he drunkenly thought she looked like an angel, or a nymph, at least until he saw the disgust on her face. He felt like she slapped him. That would have been better, it would have hurt less.)  
She didn’t say anything, just turned on her heel and left with their children in tow. He heard her sigh, heard the front door open and close, and her car start, and then he was alone with the dog. Now, your dog will always love you no matter what you do, but Scarlet was asleep. Nix would have poured himself another glass but he couldn’t be bothered. No, he drank straight from the bottle instead, sat on the floor not two feet from the jagged edges of broken glass and spilled liquor. There was a framed photo on the table in which a younger Nix with a filthy face and hands was kissing a laughing Rissy. He tried to pick it up, but only succeeded in knocking it over onto the floor. The glass cracked into a spider’s web, obscuring Rissy’s face.  
Fifteen minutes later, the front door opened again. He could hear her shoes coming down the hall and then nothing. When she came in, it was in her stocking feet and she was alone. She unzipped the dress and let it crumple on the floor in a pile of lilac cotton. She picked her way across the rug delicately in her slip and then knelt on the floor in front Nix. Her head was bowed; she didn’t look at him but she did pull him to her, cradling his head to her breasts, fixing an errant lock of hair. He didn’t do or say anything, just let her pull his body forward, but he didn’t pull away from the embrace and that seemed to be enough for her. No one said anything and long minutes later she dropped to the bare floor to sit cross-legged beside him. She put her body between him and the mess he’d made.  
For a moment, they just breathed together, and then she reached for the bottle. “Here, give me that.” He waited to see what she would do, to see if she would take it from him and throw it away, but no, she took a swallow and then one more and then set it back down in the scant space between them. She looked down at her hands and then up at him for the first time since she’d come back in the door.  
“I’m sorry, Lew. I shouldn’t have left this morning. I could tell--” Her hand was tender and cool on his face, she brushed his hair back from his forehead the same way she’d always done. “And I shouldn’t have left the way I did just now. I shouldn’t have.”  
“I won’t do it any--”  
“Don’t,” she said without any judgement at all. “Don’t make a promise you can’t keep. When you’re ready. Until then, I’m not going anywhere.”  
“I--”  
“Lew, you can’t. I know that. It’s that you can’t, not that you won’t. You’ll do it when you’re ready.”  
“Okay.”  
“Okay.”  
She didn’t go anywhere, not until Nix started to feel sick. Then she went into the bathroom with him and rubbed his back while he crouched in front of the toilet and when he lay with one cheek pressed to the tile. The floor was white octagons with black squares offset between them. Subway tile marched halfway up the wall and the blue paint was a cool, soothing spring blue of robin’s eggs. Nix’s vomit stained all that clean, pretty tile and Rissy wiped it up. Everything here seemed too neat, and for a minute Nix remembered soap that turned the bathwater milky and almost opaque and the chipped tub that never looked completely clean even when it was. But that was a long time ago now.  
“I broke our picture.” This feels like both a confession and a question.  
“You broke the glass, honey, you didn’t break us.” She hardly ever uses endearments with him, usually just his name. It’s in the way she says it though, how the L comes out so liquid and soft, softer than it ever does when she says any other word. “You couldn’t. Don’t you know that, Lew?”  
He wretches and heaves, she wipes his face and gives him sips of water. She kisses him, too, at the corners of his eyes and the tip of his nose. Not his mouth, she does have her limits. When there’s nothing left to come back up, she takes him back to the sitting room. He sleeps on the couch, tucked under the sheet that Rissy spread over him. While the furniture in the front room is new, here it is older and more comfortable. Most of it is things Rissy has come across, but the wide leather couch was something Nix found. That’s where he sleeps while Rissy cleans up. (The furniture in what Nix calls his office and the kids call dad’s room is damn near indestructible. Good for jumping on. Rissy pretends she doesn’t know.)  
When he wakes, all the broken glass is gone but the rug is still wet, only it smells of whatever she used to clean it and not spent alcohol. The photo is in a new frame, Nix and Rissy both laughing again, caught in a moment of pure affection in stark black and white. There’s a green glass bottle of Coke there, too, and Scarlet awake with her chin resting on Lew’s knee, tail wagging, and brown doggy eyes filled with love and devotion. Nix wonders for the millionth time how in the world he ended up here. Safe, comfortable, loved beyond all reason.  
There’s a crayon drawing on the table, four stick figures and what must be meant to be a dog. It’s what set him off that morning, that and the memory of a long-ago drawing he’d glimpsed crumpled in the trash can with the rest of the garbage. Lopsided stick figures drawn with so much love and care; given as if it was a treasure. All kids seem to love to draw, to create. We lose that somewhere along the way. Not Richie, Nix decides, not any of his children. Nix wants to feel he deserves this, the life that fell into his lap. He doesn’t feel that way now, but he thinks maybe he can.  
In the kitchen, the ice cream has melted on the counter, still in the brown bag where Rissy’d left it. She didn’t throw it away, though. She put it in the freezer. It never freezes up the same after it’s melted, but they’ll still eat it and it’s still sweet.  
Later, in ‘dad’s room,’ in Nix’s office, he pounds a nail into the wall behind his desk. It’s where another man might put an award or a diploma, but what hangs over Nix’s desk is neither of those. It’s just his kid’s drawing: a stick-figure father holding a stick-figure mother’s hand, a stick-figure son in the dad’s other arm and a stick figure daughter hugging his waist. A brown four-legged thing that may be a dog (that’s been in a nuclear accident, Nix thinks with a grin). All of them with hearts over their heads, feet floating above jagged green grass with a stripe of blue sky hanging above them. Over all the rest of it, the smiling sun shines from the corner, its rays spreading across the page.


End file.
